Poeta din zidMimi Khalvati

Traducere, prefață, interviu: Lidia Vianu

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We have a folk legend in Romania, that of Manole, the master builder who bricked his own wife alive into the wall of the finest church he built. A poetry like Mimi Khalvati's is a wall that bricks in love, the poet's love for the world around her and for all the worlds alive her mind. Her lines are a continual defeat of pain, an alleviation of loss and a statement of power. It is the power of the fragile, the presence of the long-lost, the sense of memory and endurance without which our race would have been lost. Mimi Khalvati is a brave poet who transplants her own heart into the body of each poem.

What Iran gave Mimi Khalvati is the mystery and the quivering fears of Persian fairy-tales. Ali Baba, Aladdin, Sindbad, djinns, magicians, caliph Harun al-Rashid, plus the flaming femininity of the one heroine (Shahrazad) who has become the emblem of the tale in love, are all a subterranean world which the poet is totally unaware of, since her mother tongue is English and the whole of her mind relies on English standards. What survives of her ancestry is the desperate attempt to save the world by means of her own imagination. Mimi Khalvati is telling us in this volume the story of her own love of life.

These poems starring their author's own emotions and incidents are actually very un-Iranian in many ways. No Arabian tale  as far as I can remember  focusses on a feminine face. There is helplessness and a moral fable in them, but women are not protagonists, not in the sense of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella. I am trying to find a deep-seated reason why Mimi Khalvati essentially belongs to British literature. Possibly because she is the poet in the wall, because this volume is all about herself, in the ambiguous, discreet, tragic way that only European poetry can accomodate. And yet she bears the grief of two worlds in her soul. Her poems are a memento of what it is that makes the page tick, and that core of lived love, which the author shares with us, is the beating heart that enables the walls of literature to stand.

LIDIA VIANU

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